This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #475, on the subject of The Mother of Jairus’ Daughter.

Our Christian Gamers Guild Bible study recently reached Mark 5:22ff, a peculiar passage which begins with Jesus agreeing to go with someone to perform one miracle, healing a dying daughter, and on the way being interrupted to perform another, healing a bleeding woman.  I proposed that the two miracles were more than simply together, that they were connected, and the connection appeared to be that the woman was the mother of the girl.  Someone rightly asked what evidence there was for this, and I realized that would require pulling together a lot of little bits and pieces that might not be significant in themselves but which seem to point to something.

In this, it also happened by one of those intriguing coincidences that while I was posting the Mark passage I was simultaneously studying the Luke passage which should post in a couple years; the Matthew passage has already been outlined for posting, so I have been to some degree comparing that in the process.  I thus decided that I ought to put it all together and offer it to you.

I’ll also mention that I did not notice this myself.  One of the most intelligent people I know, the Reverend (now undoubtedly Doctor) David D. Oldham (whom I have known since high school) pointed it out to me.  However, our discussion of it was considerably less detailed, and he left it to me to examine those details.

1. The fact that we have nested miracles at all is itself unique.  This is the only place in the New Testament where one miracle occurs inside the other.  We might write that off to narrative style, but that all three Synoptic Gospels include the account nested like this–not one of them separates this into two distinct events.
2. The two miracles are connected by the statement of twelve years.  We are told that the girl was twelve years old in Mark 5:42 and in Luke 8:42; we are similarly told that the woman had been having this flow of blood for twelve years in Mark 5:25, Matthew 9:20, and Luke 8:43.  The juxtaposition in Luke of the two statements being in consecutive verses suggests that he recognized the significance.  Matthew omits the age of the girl, but he truncates the story significantly so although his omission weakens the case, it doesn’t negate it.
3. The presence of this number is the more significant when you recognize that this story of the dying girl is the only occasion on which we are told the age of the person afflicted.  There were other occasions on which Jesus healed or delivered children, but their age was never given.  That it is given here suggests that it matters.  Yet the only obvious way in which it matters is that it matches the other number.
4. It is also made more significant in that we are never otherwise told how long someone was afflicted, except in cases in which it was from birth.  Our woman has had this problem for the same length of time that the child has been alive–that is, she has had it since the birth of the child.
5. The affliction itself probably escapes our attention, because when we, particularly we gentile men, read that she has had a flow of blood for an extended time we don’t immediately connect that to continual vaginal bleeding–yet that must be what it was.  Further, it is not at all uncommon for women to develop extended vaginal bleeding post-partum, and so if she had given birth twelve years ago and was still bleeding, that would be an ailment that would totally disrupt her life but would not be rapidly fatal.
6. It is also noteworthy that we are told that the man is a principle leader of the synagogue, in Mark 5:22 and Luke 8:41 both of which give his name; the truncated Matthew account says only that he is a leader in 9:18.  However, the fact that he is named–another very unusual feature of the miracle accounts–suggests that the writers expect at least some of the readers to recognize his name.
7. This fact that he was such a leader would mean that if this is his wife and the mother of his daughter she would have to have been put out of the house–contact with a woman with continual vaginal bleeding would make him continually unclean and unable to perform his duties at the synagogue.  Thus we find her living on the street, even though she once had the means to pay doctors in an effort to solve the problem.  The family has been separated for most of twelve years, the daughter growing up without her mother.
8. On that, the story of the girl is split in two parts by the story of the woman, and in the first part only her father Jairus is mentioned.  The mother joins the story only after the healing of the woman when Jesus takes her inside with Him in Luke 8:51 and in Mark 5:40.  Luke 8:56 repeats the recognition of the presence of the mother by saying He gave the girl to her parents.
9. Both of those accounts tell us that when Jesus arrived at the house and went in to see the girl, the mother entered the house with Him.  Why was she not already in the house, at the bedside of her dying daughter?  We might suppose that she had been waiting outside for her husband to return with news about the healer, but it’s a better fit if we see her coming to the house with Jesus and the others because she is the mother who has been excluded from the home for all these years due to her ailment.
10. It is a very minor point, but all three accounts initially identify the woman with the greek word γυνὴ, which is a tricky word in Greek because of the culture of the time.  It literally means a “woman”.  However, it was the word automatically used to identify a “wife”.  Thus each time the word “woman” appears in the passage it could mean “wife”, that on the way Jesus met a wife, and healed the wife, and the wife told of her affliction and her healing.  It is not conclusive, but it is noteworthy.
11. It might be argued that after the healing of the woman Jesus told her to leave–but the text does not say that.  In Mark 8:34 he tells her to “retire into peace”, which might mean that she should leave but might rather mean that she should leave her fears behind because she is now healed.  Similarly in Luke 8:48 the statement is “travel into peace”, which could have that meaning, or could mean that she should continue her journey without fear.  That journey might reasonably be taking her home.  Matthew has no statement telling her to leave, only reassurance of her healing.
12. In all three accounts Jesus makes a point of identifying the woman who was healed.  It is very dramatic covering several verses in both Mark and Luke, but even Matthew makes the point that He found her in the crowd and identified her.  That might have been solely for her benefit, but it makes sense for Him to identify the woman if indeed she is the mother of the girl and her husband has to be aware that she has now been healed and can return to the home.
13. The fact that Matthew 9:22 tells us that the cure was permanent strongly suggests that the woman did not vanish into the crowd, but that someone was still in contact with her over the years to come.  We aren’t told who she was specifically, but this detail suggests that she must have been someone known within the community, and someone for whom if the condition returned the community would know, which would apply to the wife of the synagogue leader.
14. On the whole, if the woman is the wife of the synagogue leader and mother of the girl, then this is not one story tucked inside an unrelated other, but the story of Jesus restoring a family, bringing the mother back into the home and saving the life of the daughter.  It is a theory that gives us a whole picture here.

Thus I contend that the woman healed of her bleeding in the middle of the story of the healing of the daughter of the synagogue leader is the mother of the child, the estranged wife of the synagogue leader, being restored to her place in the home as the life of her daughter is saved.

There is a second issue in this passage worth comment (also pointed out to me by the aforementioned David Oldham).  All three accounts tell us that the people at the house believed the girl had died.  Interpreters generally conclude that they were right, that the girl had died and Jesus here restores her to life.  The problem is that Jesus insists that the girl is not dead but sleeping.  He is reported to have said this in Matthew 9:24, Mark 5:39, and Luke 8:52.  We, though, ignore what Jesus said and assume that He was being metaphorical.

Does the context otherwise support this?  It does not say that Jesus restored her to life.  In Matthew 9:25 the verb is that He lifted her, sometimes rendered raised but meaning no more than that He helped her to her feet.  In Mark 5:41 the statement is given in Aramaic but then translated to Greek, the verb here meaning to raise yourself, often used of awakening.  That same Greek verb is used in Luke 8:54.  Both of these verbs are sometimes used metaphorically for awakening the dead, and might be being so used here, but they do not prove the girl was dead rather than comatose.  It is also significant that the Aramaic verb used by Mark does not mean to awaken but to stand, which might again indicate that Jesus believed her to be alive.

Luke 8:55 uses the idiomatic phrase “her spirit returned”, which might be taken to mean that her spirit had left and she was dead.  However, Greek usage suggested that when someone slept their spirit went on a brief trip elsewhere, and that it returned when they awoke, so again we have something inconclusive.

Thus we cannot genuinely prove whether the girl was alive or dead when Jesus reached her, but as my friend suggests on this point we should probably believe what Jesus says.  After all, He seems quite adamant about it.

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #469, on the subject of Church History.

This title is overblown.  About fifteen years ago I did a twenty-three part series at the Christian Gamers Guild Chaplain’s Bible Study about Church History, which at the time I thoroughly researched and still had to be corrected on a few points, and I’m not doing that research again now and not even re-reading that series.  But I was asked a question, and I’m going to attempt to muddle through an answer which I hope is adequate.

The questioner asks me such questions periodically, and sometimes I address them on Facebook, but when they get complicated I resort to writing posts for this weblog.  This time the question reads:

I’m confused so I turn to you for enlightenment.  Even when I was Protestant I had no idea between charismatics and Pentecostals and Calvinists.  They seem to fight a lot according to these so called faith based preachers that are on my video feed.  I enjoy listening to them for purely entertainment purposes because frankly, they tell me nothing other than their dislike for the other.  Maybe you could shed some light.

For background, the questioner was raised Lutheran, attended a Lutheran Bible college briefly and became serious about Christian faith when he played in a Christian band.  He converted to Roman Catholicism to accommodate his second wife, and has studied the beliefs of that church more intently than he had studied Protestantism generally or Lutheranism specifically.  Most of that is outside the parameters of the question anyway, but it might help the reader to understand my starting point.

It probably isn’t much use to understand the origins of the Reformation, but I find it at least interesting.  We actually start in England with Wycliff, who put forward the idea that ordinary people should have access to the text of the Bible in their own language.  The Catholic Church opposed this concept, because it was felt that uneducated people reading the Bible in versions that were not the original text or Latin translations rendered by persons who had been identified as “Saints” would get wrong ideas and teach them to others–and there was by this time a long history of heresies started by reasonably educated and scholarly people who read the Bible and got wrong ideas from it, so there was some reason for concern.  Wycliff was far enough from Rome to survive scrutiny, and his message managed to reach a man in Czechoslovakia named Hus.  He wrote a few things that the church didn’t particularly like, but he didn’t actually cross any lines, and his teachings were preserved within the monastic orders for consideration.  They thus reached a young monk named Martin Luther, who found them enlightening and realized that there were some problems with what the church was teaching and doing at that time, so he wrote a list of problems he thought the church should discuss, his ninety-five theses.  He posted a copy on the front door of his church in Germany, as announcements of local interest were generally promulgated, and mailed copies to a few friends around Europe.  One of those friends had access to a Gutenberg moveable type printing press, untested technology at the time, and made many copies of this, which then flooded Europe, and what was supposed to be a starting point for discussion became a battle line for division.

I believe that everyone is wrong about something, including me; a major point of study is to identify my own errors and correct them, which I have done repeatedly over the decades as I refine my understanding of what scripture actually teaches.  A corollary to that is every denomination holds a fundamental error in its doctrine, and this appears at the Reformation.

Whether or not it was official, the perceived message of the Catholic Church was that to get into heaven you had to be sinlessly perfect.  To achieve sinless perfection, you had to be forgiven, and divine forgiveness was mediated through the church.  Thus you confessed your sins to priests who gave you absolution, and usually prescribed penance–good deeds you should do to earn that forgiveness.  Probably that would have been stated as demonstrating that you deserve it, but it’s not very different in concept.  Because of this Last Rites are extremely important, because before you die you must confess all the sins you undoubtedly committed since your last confession, or you will have to pay for them in Purgatory or even go to Hell.  This led to abuses–if the church mediates forgiveness, you can be given forgiveness for wrongs you have not yet committed, and thus the sale of indulgences had become popular, the church prospectively forgiving sins you planned to commit in exchange for substantial gifts you gave to the church.

Luther rejected these ideas.  Forgiveness, he argued, was not earned but given freely, paid for by the sacrifice of Jesus.  It was given to everyone who had faith, and the church had no control over that.  Calvin agreed with this–but then they had a problem.  They were determined that in their understanding Christianity was never about doing something to earn your salvation–works–but entirely about faith, but it struck them that if you had to choose to have faith, then faith was something you did, and therefore a work, and they were back where they started with using faith to earn salvation, something that was a gift and could not be earned.  They each resolved this in a different way.

As an aside, I think this is where the Reformers made their error.  Later denominations have argued in essence that faith, a choice, is not a work, an act, and thus you can choose to trust God and so be saved without that counting as a good work that you did.  Strict Reformation Christians criticize this as “Decision Theology”, that you get to choose whether to believe, because the solution to the faith-is-works problem that the Reformers gave is that you don’t choose to believe, God chooses to give you faith, to cause you to believe.  In support of this, Ephesians 2:8f is frequently cited, reading (in the American Standard Version) for by grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works, that no man should glory.  The error here is thinking that the “that” refers to the faith, but “that” is neuter and needs a neuter referent, and both “faith” and “grace” are feminine, so the “gift”, which is neuter, has to be the focus of the statement, the salvation which is given by grace and received through faith.

However, working from the assumption that faith had to be a gift, Calvin deduced, logically, that God decided who would and would not be saved, entirely arbitrarily, and individuals had no choice in the matter–either God saved you, or he didn’t.  This gives us the “Five Points of Calvinism”, which in English are recalled by the mnemonic “TULIP”:

1. Total Depravity, that people are too corrupt ever to be able to do anything genuinely good on their own;
2. Unconditional Election, that God makes his choice without reference to anything about us;
3. Limited Atonement, that Jesus didn’t die for everyone but only for those God chose to save;
4. Irresistible Grace, that if you have been chosen you cannot fail to believe;
5. Perseverance of the Saints, that those who are actually divinely chosen will persevere to the end and so be saved.

Thus Calvin’s answer was that God arbitrarily decides who will be saved, forces those people to have faith, saves them, and condemns everyone else.  This is strict Calvinism.  Luther, by contrast, resolved the matter with an irrational solution:  God offers to give everyone faith to believe, and if you accept that faith it’s no credit to you, but you can reject it, in which case you are responsible for your own damnation.

The churches which call themselves “Reformed”, “Calvinist”, or “Presbyterian” generally follow Calvin’s schema, although as I read in a booklet by Catholics explaining Presbyterianism, most members of such churches are more interested in whether they are following Jesus than whether they are following Calvin.  It is also followed by some Baptist denominations, but others follow the line of Arminius, who attempted to correct Calvinism’s strict double-predestination system (you are predestined to be saved or predestined to be lost), which led to decision theology, adopted by many Baptists and most of the Evangelical movement.  It should be noted that there are Calvinist Evangelists, whose motivations are first that evangelism is commanded and second that we don’t know whom God is going to save so we have to present the message to everyone.

So we’re almost halfway there–these are the Calvinists.  They are distinguished from earlier Catholics by the belief that salvation is entirely by grace through faith with no relation to works, and from later Evangelical denominations by the belief that people really don’t have a choice but are chosen and given faith without reference to their own feelings about the matter.

We now have to move through a few centuries and a couple of “Great Awakenings” in which new denominations such as the Baptists and the Methodists arose, to get to the end of what some call the Third Great Awakening (others object that there are only two), involving Moody and Finney.  In the wake of this there were strange events, among them healings, visions, and ecstatic speech.  The concept developed that some people went beyond being saved to being “baptized in the Holy Spirit”.  This was the foundation of the Pentecostal movement, which led to the creation of several Pentecostal denominations united by a recognition of this “second” experience and manifestations of Spirit involvement, most notably speaking in tongues.

Established denominations in which this was not a reality could not accept the notion that there was “more of God than you know”.  Whatever this new experience was, it couldn’t be of God, because the established churches all believed that there was nothing else God was doing in the world that they didn’t have.  In fact, all of them had theological explanations for why these didn’t exist–they were limited to the capital-S Saints, or they ceased at the end of the first century as the New Testament replaced them, or the references actually are to natural gifts like preaching and translation and medical skills.  The Pentecostals couldn’t be called heretics because they maintained all the essentials of orthodox docrine, but many denominations believed that the supposed supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit were demonic.  Pentecostalism was thus marginalized for the first half of the twentieth century.

Sometime around 1960, plus or minus a few years, small numbers of members of traditional denominations became involved with Pentecostals (probably due to the ecumenical movement) and brought concepts of Pentecostalism back to their churches.  Beginning with the Catholics, these groups were called “charismatic” from the Greek “charisma”, a gift of divine grace.  Many of these groups “received the left foot of fellowship” from their churches, but by 1970 there were established “charismatic movements” in all the major denominations (Baptists were generally the holdout), but there were also independent fellowships built on charismatic theology that were evolving into churches.  They tend to blend Pentecostal experience with more traditional church practices, peculiarly mostly the Baptist practices and beliefs, probably because the Baptists were most resistant to accepting the Charismatics as a genuine move of God.  However, there are Charismatic churches in most denominations, and Charismatic groups in many churches that are affiliated with traditional denominations.

Calvinists generally believe that Evangelicals are wrong about the ability to choose to have faith, and thus they are against Pentecostal and Charismatic beliefs because of that, but also because of a belief that all the miraculous manifestations of the Spirit are relegated to the first century.  Pentecostals and Charismatics criticize Calvinists for failure to recognize that people can choose to have faith, and for excluding the power of God from their religion.  Pentecostals criticize Charismatics for trying to “pour new wine into old wineskins”, saying that the new move of God won’t work in the old churches, and Charismatics criticize Pentecostals for throwing out the baby with the bathwater, that is, overlooking that there is much in the denominational traditions that has value and should be preserved.

All of that is a bit simplistic, and indeed there are Calvinist Pentecostals and Charismatic Calvinists.  Most Pentecostals and Charismatics are Evangelicals, but not all.  Many Pentecostals and Charismatics fellowship together.  However, as has been observed by others, the closer any two groups are to each other, the more emphasis they put on their differences.

I hope that helps.